By Don Liddick

“The carrion-fowl gather.”

“Aye, ever has it been—the blood of men, even ere it be shed, acts as portent for beasts and discerning wizards.”

Two stood on the escarpment, sidereal illume a mere glint on the broad cuirass of the one, the greater—the other a slender but eager shadow, bairn of the mighty man of war, nervously playing the string of his yew bow like a virtuoso on his cithern. Father and son, fear in absentia, awaiting the first blush of dawn, and the wet thud of steel cleaving living meat. There was no moon, and a haze and a mist dimmed the stars so that the gloom became a palpable thing to breathe in and belabor lungs. Though they could see no more than a yard or two, a sub-audible murmur, a subtle tremor of the earth beneath their booted feet, bespoke of a vast host encamped on the plain below.

Iralud, the boy of fifteen winters, passed these last anxious moments before battle by reviewing in his mind the previous night’s march, from familiar mead and vale, across the river at Raven Ford, and through the Glowing Wood, where none of the People of the Scaur had ever dared to linger. The previous night the roots of the trees had illumined the forest road on either side like phosphorescent pythons that squirmed out of the dark earth, and beneath the occasional clink of buckler and muffled thud of hoof a murmur ran, as of a whisper and rumor along mould and canopy. And yet the army of his people had passed the Wood unhindered, debouched, and were now situated in two great lines along the rim of the low, treeless ridge.

The thunder of a rider broke the subdued, anxious waiting, there was a clink of chain mail as a man dismounted, and a great black-bearded giant strode up to Iralud’s father with a joyful salutation.

“Gorhelm the Iron-Handed marches south down the vale, and beneath a thousand steel morions a thousand hammers thirst for countless skulls to crush!”

“Countless no more, Scyheld—our scouts report some twelve thousand spears forest the plain where yesterday there was only grass for beeves. Ere dawn birth a red day the guts of many men will grease the heels of those left standing.”

Gorhelm’s grim warriors gave them an army of three thousand, but the enemy outnumbered them four to one. And still, as Baralud his father and Scyheld conversed, Iralud noted with savage pride that in the voices of both men one could hear a tone of unmistakable joy at the impending carnage.

Rumor of their coming had traveled far in advance of the ravening hoard. All through the spring and summer foreign travelers trickled over Raven Ford, but would not stay long, pausing only for a night at the public hostel to whisper of a merciless army that ravaged towns far to the east. Here in the West Realms people tended to their own affairs, and the “advanced” nations to the east and the ports that led to still more distant continents concerned the People of the Scaur not at all. But soon the trickle of strangers grew to a steady stream, and while the increased trade was most welcome, the news was less so. By the harvest amorphous rumor congealed into an imminent threat, as the ravagers entered lands some of the people had visited in their own lifetimes. Long disused foundries were activated, and young men who had known only peace in their lifetimes joyfully attended the instruction of stern-countenanced elders.

Yet even among the stoutest warriors ran a sobering current—not doubt, no, and never fear—a mature awareness that what approached was unlike any enemy grizzled veteran or historical tradition could tell. For when the God of Winds painted the leaves before their fall, panicked easterners as rugged as Baralud himself hurried through with fear-haunted eyes, families in tow, telling stories of dark magic, and inhuman warriors who fed off the flesh and blood of corpses.

And so along the base of the Scaur village councils ordered the marshalling of their forces—all males of fifteen to seventy winters—and appointed Baralud as supreme Battle Weird. Iralud puffed visibly with pride, his father the trustee of the People’s fate, chosen for a reputation beyond reproach, and a strength greater than any man of the Scaur. The harvest done, old men, children and women fled to the caves far up the face of the cliffs, hauling hundred foot ladders up after them. If the tide of battle turned against them, they could hold out in the network of tunnels for a year or more, and then perhaps escape by secret ways into the highlands beyond the scope of knowledge and memory. But Baralud did not intend for the battle to go ill.

One doubt only worried at the minds of some, though Baralud and his captains would not hear it spoken aloud. The People of the Scaur had no shamans of their own, having dismissed them for exploiting the fears of women and stealing from village treasuries. But the rumor that spread before the oncoming hoard was of some black wizardry, and so with no magic of their own, some few of the People doubted the sharpness of their steel blades. But not so with Baralud and the hardened core of his warriors, who feared no deviltry, trusted the Spirits of Wind, Water, Fire, and Stone, and yearned only for mortal flesh to hew—be it human, sub-human, or demonic.

Now, massed along the low ridge, Barlud’s eager host of warriors were suddenly engulfed by shrouds of grey ghosts that whispered coldly through them—wisps of mist on a freshening breeze that heralded the approaching dawn, and mighty deeds. Iralud fitted an iron-tipped arrow to the string, and his father rested a reassuring hand on the lad’s narrow shoulder. Baralud had not permitted the boy to join the body of archers in the vanguard, and for the first time Iralud felt as if he would obey his father’s command to stick close. No target was yet visible, but the presence of the enemy in the vale just below was unmistakable—a looming threat, gibbering just beneath audibility with some insidious glee.

The haze and mist was gone now, and the stars in the east began to fade with the growth of a silver thread limning the horizon. Everything stopped, there was no sound, and a heaviness in Iralud’s chest warned him that he must soon resume breathing. His father’s hand tightened on his shoulder, and two thousand souls in the Army of the Scaur froze, muscles taut, as they intuited some great beast was about to spring upon them. A loud sound, the engines of war, broke the pre-dawn quiet. The sudden ruckus startled hundreds of geese that had been resting along the small stream in the vale into flight, the aggregate sound of their wings huge and uncanny. But the carrion fowl wheeled far above, greedy with anticipation.

One more moment of anticipatory silence, then a single voice echoed along the ridge and through the shallow vale—Baralud had recognized the sound of dozens of catapults loosed together, and now ordered the raising of shields. Iralud raised his oak shield reinforced with iron bands above his head, and crouched down just as a dark rain of heavy shot began to pummel their lines. It came upon them in a ruinous hail, thudding heavily on shield and turf. All was still quite dark, and so in the midst of the tumult no man could at once discern the true nature of the projectiles, which were large but strangely lighter than stone. One object struck Iralud’s raised shield with a wet, heavy thud, and he thought for one ridiculous moment that the invaders were bombarding them with melons gleaned from the fields.

The planet rotated. A faint, silver light grew, providing scant illumination to the field of battle. And now the creeping horror leapt, at last, and squeezed and suffocated the hearts and guts of men. The last wet smack of a projectile hit the grass nearby, and a moment’s silence was quickly shunted aside by a peculiar sound, one that Iralud did not recognize for a single, stunned moment. His father, Baralud, stern of countenance beyond the reckoning of mortals, was weeping. The great man sank to his knees, sobbing loudly, and now deep-throated cries of anguish and despair rose from the entire host up to the heavens, where the sound intermingled and fused with the insane croak of buzzards. Time slowed as Iralud looked down at the projectile that had glanced off his shield. For a moment his mind failed to comprehend—refused to acknowledge what his senses perceived. It was a naked infant, a newborn, and Iralud retched when he understood that the dark snake dangling from the babe’s torso was its umbilicus.

In that moment of doubt the enemy attacked, steel-tipped spears lowered in an implacable mass to impale the first line of archers Baralud had positioned near the base of the grade. Foul unshod feet splashed across the shallow stream, but the only sound the attackers made, at first unrecognizable to the archers of the Scaur, was a mockery of human laughter— a low, insane tittering that conjured visions of a mass of squirming maggots busy in some carcass.

Two hundred archers loosed their arrows as one. Scores found their mark, but out of the gloom thousands of loping humanoid figures could now be discerned. The pre-dawn light glinted dimly off the point of spears, suddenly mere yards away. The archers quickly retreated up the slope and to either flank of the line, as pre-arranged, making way for a thousand charging warriors.

The horror and despair from being pelted with hundreds of born and unborn infants had done little physical damage, but in Baralud and his men the assault on their very souls awakened something elemental and primal that grew into a force above hate, beyond rage. Iralud felt it too, but his own horror and anger was replaced with fear for his father, whose mind had most likely snapped. Baralud ran yards in front of the charging host, tearing at his beard, tossing away his shield, discarding his armor—fey and reckless. Only his truncheon did he keep, waving the stout oaken club above his head, the heavy iron ball fused to the end of it whistling through the air, enigmatically audible even above the roar of imminent, thirsty carnage. The lad tried to keep up, but soon his father had melded into the gloom that seemed to blind both heart and mind.

The opposing forces met at last, and the shock of it caused the brooding will that held together the invaders to momentarily waver. Across the vale a quarter of a league to the east, safely ensconced in a spherical black cloud that levitated above the field, the dark wizard Izzarael afforded grudging admiration to Baralud’s host—their consuming hatred was most impressive; and in the darkest recesses of his mind, where the worm dieth not, Izzarael thought that perhaps a few of these men could be spared, so that he might twist their hate into new incarnations of evil.

Iralud ran in search of his father, arrow still fitted and ready, the roar of the men of the Scaur now displaced by the din of battle in earnest. Men screamed as they were impaled on spears, but more prominent was the other-worldly shrieks of the enemy, which sounded to the Scaur-folk like the death throes of rabid curs. All was chaotic motion and frenzied sound, muddled turmoil in a sea of raging death. A humanoid leaped at Iralud from out of the darkness. Its face was a nightmare, but the boy’s attention was quickly drawn to the glint of a curved steel poniard that sought his throat. Time slowed again, and he released the arrow at the same time he raised the bow, not bothering to aim. The arrow pierced the thing’s throat—luck—and it fell dead with a gurgle at his feet. There it lay, the enemy, and even in the midst of swirling Death made tangible he couldn’t avert his eyes from the alien countenance—its single pus-filled eye, the pallor of mottled corpse-skin, and the maw filled with a hundred grey tentacles like a nest of putrescent worms.

Frozen in disgust, still Iralud sensed the approach of his death. A displacement of air behind his head portended the descent of some weapon, and he ducked the blow, instinctively. An iron club glanced off his light helm, spinning him around. A nightmare visage filled his world—what he expected to be his last mortal sight—and a waft of its fetid breath made him retch, incapacitated and doomed. But then the creature’s head exploded with a wet crack of its skull, spraying Iralud with bone chips, blood, and pieces of brain. Baralud swept his truncheon back in one swift motion, and another monstrosity lost its entire lower jaw in a spray of gore.

Now the warriors of the Scaur pressed forward, striking aside spears and felling squealing creatures with sword, truncheon, and halberd. Iralud stayed with his father, shouldering his bow in favor of a short sword which he used to guard Baralud’s right flank, chopping off hands and arms when an enemy dared approach. Many men fell, never to rise, but the flame of their madness drove them deep into the enemy hoard. Yet the numerical imbalance was such that the enemy would not turn and flee despite the ferocious onslaught—and the maleficent will that held them did not falter. And then the initial success of the Scaur-men actually precipitated too great a penetration, so that a large u-shape was formed in the lines, with masses of enemies now enveloping them on both flanks. Even in the midst of their fury the changing tide of battle caused men to pause, and then Baralud thundered “Form a ring!” as the press of the hoard hemmed them in.

Now the end of the Scaur-men must surely come, outnumbered and weary as they were, and the remnant of the people must withstand a long siege in the cliffs. Even through the red haze of battle lust Baralud felt it. Iralud looked at his father. A stream of blood ran down the great man’s face from a shallow scalp wound to his tattered beard—and he was smiling. Then Iralud heard the cry above the battle din: “Gorhelm! Gorhelm comes at last!”

Up and down the serried ranks the cry was taken up, and the obscenities they fought with paused, and doubted. From the north they came, Gorhelm’s grim thousand, and the cacophony of hammers obliterating naked skulls rose to the firmament to challenge the baleful croaking of the carrion fowl. Then at last Baralud gave the signal, and a single flaming arrow shot up, and three hundred heavily armored horse drove in from the south, creating a pincer that threw the enemy into frenzied confusion. Now the tide of battle turned again in favor of the Scaur, and Baralud rallied the remaining foot warriors with renewed vigor. Soon the two pincers—Gorhelm with his hammers and Scyheld driving foes with his cavalry—came close to meeting in the middle of the now fear-crazed host, while Baralud and the stoutest of his men drove in the middle toward the stream, treading pulverized sub-humans beneath their booted feet. The inhuman brood, caught between hammer and anvil, fell by the hundreds, and the thousands, and would have faltered and fled had it not been for the sustaining will of the power that held them.

Suspended a furlong above the ground in his shadow-sphere, Izzarael, the black wizard, had foreseen much. Even now he was biding his time, enjoying his sport as the spider with the fly. But now the time had come, the opportune moment when beyond all hope the fly thought it might miraculously escape the web—when the spider would sting to kill with its most noxious venom. The wizard muttered in an arcane language for some moments, and a portal to a pocket universe opened—a rectangle of utter void that blotted out a section of the dark sky. Through the gate pored a brood of winged demons from the nether reaches of the blackest nightmare realm, hundreds of them, eager to fulfill the summons, and drain the life from any and all prey.

The approach of doom did not sound like footsteps, but the rush of a prodigious wind. To Iralud, it was the sound a flock of birds made when they took flight all at once on a crisp pre-winter dawn—but the wings of these were much larger. Looking up he saw them, a dark blot of growing movement that appeared to materialize from nowhere, and which soon filled the entire sky. Both armies looked skyward, mesmerized, and the ichtzierari descended in a whirring cloud of death.

A dun shape dove at Iralud’s head, and he fell flat to the turf as if struck by a bolt of lightning, sharp talons tearing a tuft of hair from his scalp. He looked up and saw it swoop back up, trailing a reptilian tail, and flapping leathery wings a full six feet across. Mere yards away Baralud stooped and picked up a spear, and with a movement too quick for Iralud to follow his father thrust up and through the torso of a descending monstrosity. It wriggled there on the spear, jerking Baralud’s arms in its death throes. Iralud got a good look at the thing’s head then, and immediately wished that he hadn’t—it had a dozen bulbous eyes, a weeping orifice in the midst withal, and a mouthful of razor-edged oblivion. A long red tongue slithered down four feet of spear to wrap around Baralud’s wrist, and then he heaved spear and demon off to the side, where the creature continued to splash about for some moments in the corrupted stream.

Just on the far side of the shallow creek a horse screamed, and Iralud seized on the memory of his mother in childbirth, and the angelic face of the sister he would likely never see again. One of the winged monsters had settled onto a struggling horse, the rider of the Scaur crushed beneath the weight of both mount and demon. Talons dug out hunks of flesh from the animal’s side, and fangs ripped out its muscular throat in a splash of blood. The thing began drinking the spurting fluid in noisy, sloppy gulps, and then Iralud’s arrow found one of its eyes.

“A fine shot, boy!”

Iralud did not fill with pride at his father’s compliment—he’d become a man in the last five minutes, and so, like the other men of the Scaur, was now concerned only with killing as many enemies as possible before the end. He shot another of the winged obscenities out of the sky while his father stood nearby, bellowing lustrously with the joy of battle: Barlud was bludgeoning a single-eyed, wormy-mouthed enemy into a smear on the creek bank.

But the enemy numbers were too great, and now Baralud’s warriors died quickly. Grim Gorhelm the hammer-hand fell pierced by three spears after he’d cracked the neck of an ichzierari with his bare hands; Scyheld the brave slew many before he was unhorsed, disemboweled, and consumed; hundreds of stout Scaur-men were ripped apart, shredded by blade, talon and fang.

A crackling filled the air, an electric charge that raised the fine hair on Iralud’s forearm, and then the smell of cooking flesh assaulted his nostrils in the same instant a flash of light turned the battle field into a weird mezzotint of blacks and whites. Men and demon-invaders looked to the east, to the blush of dawn, where the final horror approached, buzzing with power and electricity. A large, perfectly spherical hole in the sky hovered over them, and from its edges white-blue tongues of flame flickered. Inside the sphere, Izzarael, meditative and serene, levitated and dreamed of darker worlds. And now another tongue of lightning leapt from the edge of the black hole, forked, and two men dropped smoking to the grass, lumps of fused armor and burnt meat. Iralud shot an arrow at the heart of the sphere, but the shaft withered, emitted a truncated pfffftt sound, and became a wisp of intangible smoke, ineffectually dispersed.

Screaming men. The shrill cry of sub-humans. The sound of feeding—a messy slurping and chomping. Another lightning bolt, and the whiff of sudden death. Thunder rumbled and reverberated across the Glowing Wood to the cliffs, echoing the despair of the Scaur. Baralud raised his truncheon to crush Iralud’s skull—lovingly, mercifully.

Suddenly, larger than the screams of dying men, a whisper and a rustling filled Baralud’s mind. He hesitated. The sound was not coming from inside his head, but was all around, in the air and under the earth. A blur of motion—the descent of a winged demon, talons stiffly extended, eager. Another significant whisper, near his ear, and a quick streak of luminescence shot past Barlud’s head. What looked like a grey, phosphorescent tentacle wrapped around the flying demon’s furry neck with lightning speed. Baralud saw the root—that’s what it was, because it was coming from the ground—expand and flex, and then the head of the ichzierari separated from the rest of its noxious body in a spray of dark ichor.

The enchanted trees of the Glowing Wood had entered the fray.

Mayhem beyond mortal senses to perceive ensued. Recognition that the havoc of battle had progressed to an entirely supernatural realm caused the men of the Scaur to stop fighting then, intuiting that the outcome was beyond their mortal control—many, including Iralud, simply cast themselves onto the ground and covered their heads. But Baralud and the stoutest of the Scaur-folk stood fast, enraptured by the unfolding, surreal panoply. The earth boiled, exploding upward in sprays of dirt and turf. Thousands of glowing tree roots writhed and squirmed in chaotic profusion—and yet, a sentient will guided them, for their inexorable purpose soon become apparent. The roots, thick as a man’s thigh where they protruded from the ground, but branching out to become countless hair-thin tendrils, everywhere sought out and latched onto the enemy. Quicker than a catamount a grey-white root enveloped a monster next to Baralud, and the enemy was ripped apart in a spray of body fluids and tissue. All around tree tentacles shot to the sky and snatched the winged ichzierari out of the air. Roots expanded around prey like flexing muscle tissue. Mass screams of death were accompanied by a prodigious crackling and popping—the sound of bones splintering like so many twigs. And not a single warrior of the Scaur was so much as scratched by a flowing, living tree root.

Far above now, floating in his sphere, Izzarael wavered. He’d somehow failed to foresee the damnable intervention of the Wood, his vision clearly having been clouded by some redoubtable force he’d not reckoned with. And in his moment of doubt the will that drove the hideous invaders faltered, and the people of the Scaur were delivered. Much of the remaining horde tried to flee, but none would leave that field, so quick and sure were the trees of the Glowing Wood. Some roots shot skyward to challenge the spherical void that held the wizard, but fell back, singed and smoking. Looking up then, Baralud saw the end of it. The black hole in the sky grew lighter, somehow less opaque, and from the depths of that pit two golden eyes glowed, malevolent and burning with hate. Then sphere and eyes disappeared in a single beat of the heart, Izzarael returned to realms beyond the ken of simple men, and the rush of air that filled the void where the sphere had been generated a rumble of thunder that made old men, women, and children leagues to the west tremble and wonder as they huddled in the caves.

Silver light waned and blended into a warmer hue. The darkness fled. Writhing, glowing tree roots returned to the earth, the unnatural sound of their passage the only thing to be heard. Everywhere the turf writhed in thousands of undulating lines as the roots retreated to the west, back to the Glowing Wood.

Iralud looked up then from where he cowered, so strange was the fall of complete silence that had descended on the corpse-strewn field. Not even a buzzard croaked in anticipation—perhaps lamenting the unforeseen survival of the Scaur. Baralud stood nearby, gore-streaked and silent, knee-deep in the shallow stream that now flowed in a thick soup of body parts and entrails.

Only seven hundred men of the Scaur still lived, many of these horribly wounded. None of the enemy was left intact. Some men groaned low in agony, but most bore their pain in silence. To the east, the blush of dawn had bloomed and become a saffron morn. It was a mellow, hopeful kind of light that illuminated that terrible field.

Iralud, now burdened with the ineluctable weight of knowledge, caught his father’s far-off gaze. Underneath the grime and strings of gore that befouled his beard, Baralud was smiling.

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